WHO could ever imagine that the women who cast their lot with God’s servants would find themselves vilified by Saint Jerome as “one-man harlots”? And this was the same Jerome who, as a neophyte monk in the latter part of the 4th century, had struggled so furiously to conquer his own lust. Many clerics succumbed, sometimes easily, to the temptations that bedeviled Jerome, and because they could not or would not live without a woman, they either married or took mistresses.
In the earliest days of Christianity, priests and monks loved and lived with women just as laymen did. But by the 4th century, the doctrine of clerical celibacy began to take root. Theology, asceticism and practical and property considerations dominated the Church Fathers’ campaign to impose clerical celibacy. The attack was multipronged and persistent. The theologians invoked doctrines about the seductive and immoral nature of Eve’s daughters, the sinfulness of sexual intercourse with them and the valor of Christian ascetics whose deprivations included sex. At the same time, these Church officials accused sexually active clerics of lacking the moral superiority they needed to minister to others. They added that sexual relationships distracted priests, who should focus exclusively on their ministry and spirituality.
Quite apart from theology, the most compelling argument for clerical celibacy was the Church’s growing wealth. Married or not, priests with family obligations consumed resources that would otherwise accumulate in the Church’s coffers—unlike celibates, they spent money to support wives, mistresses and children, and bequeathed property to them rather than to the Church.
The Church’s Synod of Elvira, held in Spain in 305, imposed celibacy on all married bishops, priests and deacons. The Synod assumed that celibacy would raise clergymen’s moral standards and justify their higher social status. It also decreed that those who continued to have sex would be defrocked. In 325, the more influential Council of Nicaea banned clerical marriage and forbade bishops, priests, deacons and all other ecclesiastics from cohabiting with a woman “unless perhaps a mother, a sister, an aunt, or such person only as be above suspicion.”2 This pronouncement effectively defined and condemned the ecclesiastical concubine, who would afterward be scorned and persecuted throughout Roman Catholic Christendom.
From 370 onward, papal dicta tightened the noose, banning sexual relations and not just marriage. The ideal of clerical celibacy was becoming widespread, though the practice was not; most married priests continued to have sex with their wives, though a stream of edicts persuaded bachelor clerics that they should not marry after they were ordained. Ambitious priests, however, recognized that celibacy was a good career move.
Despite the ban, some clerics married, joined in holy matrimony by priests either unaware of their status or willing to overlook it. Others, whether single or married, took mistresses. Pope Agapitus I, elected in 535, was the bastard son of Gordianus, one such priest. Pope John XIII (965–72) was murdered by a husband he had cuckolded. The ironically named Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92) acknowledged his brood of “bastards.” And from the 9th century to halfway through the 11th century, papal mistresses Theodora Theophylact, her daughter Marozia and their descendants were so influential that the papacy of their era is known as a “pornocracy.”
Papal mistresses, of course, were pampered and protected, but the humbler parish priest’s female partners were not. Stern 10th-century German bishops branded and humiliated women they suspected of sexual intimacy with priests by ordering their heads shorn. Spanish bishops excommunicated priests’ mistresses and, upon their deaths, had them buried without ceremony or monument.
By the 11th century, canon law was beginning to define priests’ wives as “concubines,” and it bastardized their children. In 1018, the Synod of Pavia enslaved the children of ecclesiastics and made them Church property. In 1089, the Synod of Amalfi extended this servitude to clerical wives and concubines, and those whose partners were subdeacons or higher-ranked clerics could be seized as slaves by feudal lords.
Many priests opposed these decrees. Some pleaded that they would be forced to choose between their wives and their vocations. Others predicted, correctly as it turned out, that the abolition of open marriage would lead to clandestine affairs and widescale concubinage. Secular rulers and parishioners also intervened against concubinaries—the official term for priests who kept mistresses—and the result was turmoil and chaos. In the late 11th century, German princes punished married bishops by confiscating their property, and mobs of irate parishioners hounded unpopular priests on the flimsiest pretexts. On the opposing side, concubinaries assaulted agents of Pope Gregory VII, a reformer dedicated to abolishing ecclesiastical marriage. Gregory’s reforms led to such persecution of priests’ mistresses that some of these women committed suicide.
The battle raged throughout Europe. In 1215, lawyer-pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Lateran Council, which proclaimed all clerics legally celibate, even those who had been married before their ordination. Ironically, this implied that Catholic marriage was less sacred than ordination. It also suggested to some theologians that concubinage would now become an unavoidable adjunct to the priesthood. The frequency with which solitary priests seduced—or were seduced by—women seeking spiritual and practical counseling prompted congregations to demand priests who already had a resident concubine. The rationale was that priests were driven as much by loneliness as by lust to prey on parish women; it followed that a mistress’s daily presence would curtail these sexual assaults.
Furthermore, as David Lederer and Otto Feldbauer point out in The Concubine: Women, Priests and the Council of Trent, “long-term relationships increased internal social and economic stability, bonded the clergy to their community through semi-formalized kinship ties and, as responsible fathers and husbands, presumably rendered parish priests more dependable in their discharge of their office. Minor secular officials also viewed this as an opportunity to better integrate the clergy into the ranks of the local elite.”3 It was often argued that the laity, who were such an important element of the Church, had little to gain and much to lose from clerical celibacy.
From the early 16th to the mid-17th century, the Protestant Reformation again focused attention on celibacy, and reformers were scathing in condemning it. Martin Luther himself appealed for acceptance of human weakness in matters of the flesh. His subsequent marriage to former nun Katerina von Bora spoke volumes. Many reformers cynically accused the Church of outlawing concubinage so Rome could collect vast amounts in fines from offending priests. One German bishop fined only those diocesan priests who fathered bastards, but another, to save himself the bother of identifying actual offenders, taxed all his priests. When babies arrived, they were often passed off as nieces and nephews whom the priest would be raising.
The usual priestly ploy, which survives to this day, was to pretend that his mistress was just the housekeeper. The custom of lodging Christian virgins and widows in suitable homes—and what home could be more suitable than a priest’s?—provided sanctuary and a livelihood for these women. It also provoked scandal, as closeness made so many hearts grow fonder. In later years, a priest’s mistress was known as a focaria, a term that had evolved from its original meanings of housewife, kitchen maid or soldier’s concubine, and the character of the focaria became a literary staple.
The life of a real focaria could be treacherous. The (unchristian) Christian Church continued to persecute these women relentlessly. To ferret out offenders, its officials would descend on a parish and, detective-like, interview the local priest and his parishioners. They conducted their interrogations in pairs, asking: What was known about the priest? Had he a mistress? Did he consider himself married? Had he fathered children? Did he and a woman dance with each other at weddings? Did they frequent public baths together? Some innocent parishioners, who considered their priest effective and reliable in part because he had proved himself to be a good husband and father, willingly supplied this information. But their answers had a different result from what they intended.
At first such “visitations” were sporadic, but by the 16th and 17th centuries they were a regular feature of a cleric’s life. It is impossible to evaluate the accuracy of the information gleaned from them, but the reports, which varied widely in their findings, suggest both that celibacy was becoming more common and that priests and their congregations were becoming adept at hiding what they did not want visiting church officials to know. In 1516, for example, visitations indicated that in southeast Germany, only 15 percent of priests had concubines, but in 1560, the records of another visitation pointed to markedly different conclusions. The 1560 visitation involved 418 clerics, of whom 165 refused to cooperate and 76 claimed they had never had sexual relations with their domestics. However, 154 priests acknowledged that they were in long-term sexual relationships with women, and 128 admitted to fathering between one and nine children.
The ideas of the Reformation, in particular the challenge to compulsory clerical celibacy, profoundly influenced even clergymen who remained Roman Catholic. There was a notable increase in the number of clerics openly engaged in committed relationships with women; the clerics risked the Church’s wrath, their mistresses public censure as concubines.
But anti-Reformation forces strove to quash these instances of defiance. In 16th-century Bavaria, for example, Duke Albert V and his son and successor, William the Pious, launched a crusade against clerical concubinage and marriage. William authorized his officials to hunt down offenders. The Church also granted him the right to conduct secular visitations, to search parish houses and to arrest both priests and their concubines.
In 1583 and again in 1584, at William’s instigation, Bavarian parishes were subjected to visitations. One can only imagine William’s grim satisfaction when his eager agents confirmed his suspicions. In one instance, a noblewoman had denounced a priest and his mistress-cook. Their relationship was one of such marriage-like commitment that the cook had provided a dowry just as she would have in a sanctioned marriage, and they had also exchanged rings. They lived together so openly that they thought nothing of remaining together in bed as they received people on official business. The cook’s friends testified, as well, that she had told them she had become pregnant, though it is unclear from the records whether or not she gave birth. She also defended her priestly lover from those who disparaged his virility; she insisted he was “a full-blooded man who needed a woman [and] was enough of a man for any woman.” The priest who loved her went further. If the authorities forced his mistress to leave him, he declared, he would “have his way with the other local women like the village steer.”4
The details of other relationships also emerged from the testimony of priests and their parishioners, but few mistresses were available to answer questions; they had been prudently spirited away. Yet the cautious clerics saw no reason to conceal that they were as good as married and had fathered children whom they proudly acknowledged. They even revealed that they held property jointly with their mistresses, and older priests described financial arrangements they had made to care for the women they had once slept with and loved.
After diligently recording all these details of affection and sex, procreation and domesticity, the officials involved in the 1584 visitations concluded that in some parishes, the rate of concubinage was as high as 70 percent. High as that estimate seems, the reality was almost certainly higher: the accuracy of the visitations was fundamentally flawed. First, the lay population generally tolerated and often approved these priestly unions, and so were not necessarily cooperative witnesses. More significantly, the priests had often been forewarned by an unidentified government official who had seen an excellent way to generate money. His warning and the willing collusion of local officials gave the priests enough time to either relocate their mistresses in safe houses or send them out of Bavaria.
When William learned how his mission had been sabotaged, he vowed to impose severe fines on anyone who ever again leaked confidential information. What he could not do was try priests as concubinaries under secular law. That remained the province of ecclesiastical law. The mistresses themselves, however, had no such protection, and so William declared open season on them.
A priest condemned as a fornicator by the ecclesiastical authorities typically paid a fine, ate only bread and water for three days and did a penance, often a pilgrimage. His mistress—his accomplice, in legal terminology—was also fined and subjected to rituals of public humiliation, and often received the “social death sentence,” that is, she was forced into exile.
William’s son Maximilian I, who succeeded when William abdicated to join a monastery, went even further than his grandfather and father. The result was what some historians call “a religious police state” so repressive that priestly concubinage went underground and in many cases ended. But priestly sexuality did not, and the unintended consequence of Maximilian’s vengeful crusade was an outbreak of scandal as frustrated priests without mistresses ventured into surreptitious affairs with parish wives or unmarried domestic servants. Instead of being the cherished offspring of a loving union, children conceived as a result of these hidden and dangerous liaisons were seen as incontrovertible proof of sexual transgression. Sometimes desperate parents, a priestly father or a concubine mother, abandoned or even killed their children. Priests frequently abandoned pregnant lovers to endure alone the shame and penury of unmarried motherhood.
Many priests simply hid their private lives. Under tremendous pressure from an ecclesiastical court, one elderly priest confessed that he had fathered ten children with his now-ailing sixty-year-old mistress. Another cleric, clearly beyond sexual relations, admitted that he still loved his former concubine. Some priests were unable to choose between their vocations and their families. Often they emigrated to Protestant territories, where they could serve God with the benefit of a loved helpmeet.
The relentless pressure of being spied on damaged other relationships, often irreparably. Mistresses were particularly vulnerable. The civil authorities, frustrated because they could not directly touch errant clerics, tormented their female partners. These unprotected women were subjected to interrogation with the ever-present threat of “judicial torture,” to say nothing of normal indictment, condemnation and punishment.
By the Reformation, torture was a well-established feature of legal procedure in criminal cases. It was, in the words of Ulpian, an eminent jurist, “the torment and suffering [inflicted on] the body in order to elicit the truth.”5 Torture was seen not as sadistic violence but as a calculated procedure designed to assist in the administration of justice. The torture should neither kill nor mutilate (though it frequently did). A medical expert had to be in attendance, and a notary had to record everything that transpired. A confession made under torture had to be repeated a day later, though an accused who recanted was simply tortured anew. Even confession did not necessarily end the torment; post-confession torture was the norm because it encouraged the guilty to supply the names of their accomplices.
Women and children were generally exempt from the most excruciating and crippling tortures. Instead, their hands would be tightly tied, cutting circulation, untied and retied. They were deprived of sleep for forty-hour stretches. Sometimes their soles were coated with flammable liquids and set afire. Occasionally, women, too, were stretched on the rack, burned or otherwise mutilated as men were. Women guilty only of loving a priest were justly terrified at the prospect of torture. Relationships eroded under the strain and stress of the visitations and the subsequent repression of uncelibate priests and their partners in love.
Increasingly, priests unwilling to abide by their vows of chastity satisfied themselves with women they could take to bed without consequences. Married parishioners were obvious candidates. They were accessible, either had or could invent reasons to be in the priest’s company, were quite unlikely to incur their husbands’ wrath by confessing their adultery and did not have to explain how they became pregnant.
One priest had so refined his strategies of seduction that he used the church as a love nest. He had a secret door installed and at night sneaked his married lovers through it. Then, under the altar, he had sex with them. Father Adam Sachreuter, a German priest, had a different modus operandi. While gambling with a would-be lover’s husband, he would ply him with alcohol until the man was dead drunk. Sachreuter then kindly helped his parishioner home and, after seeing him safely to bed, had sexual intercourse with the man’s wife.
Father Georg Scherer was another egregious offender; his convictions for concubinage began in 1622 and continued until 1650. Scherer slept with at least four servants, each of whom he would send away to another city when he took up with a new woman. Father Scherer’s former mistresses, who had each borne one of his children, two of whom died in questionable circumstances, were charged with the crime of fornication and incarcerated in Munich’s notorious Falcon’s Tower, the site of infamous interrogation by judicial torture. Before the women were interrogated, they were warned that if they refused to cooperate they would be tortured, and they were shown the tools that would be used to do the job. At this point the women broke down and confessed. Three were found guilty and were punished: they were either publicly shamed by being forced to don penitential garb and to stand for an entire day in the stocks in full public view in front of the church, or were permanently exiled. Scherer, held in a much less disagreeable ecclesiastical jail, was fined a paltry sum.
Clara Strauss was the fourth of Scherer’s convicted mistresses and the mother of one of his sons. Scherer testified that Clara had been the aggressor in their affair, seducing him when he was drunk and exacting thirty florins from him for her services, which made her a whore. Indeed, he had called her so, but she had laughed and made disparaging comments about his manhood. Their coupling had been a purely mercenary transaction, Scherer declared, a single incident of whoring. Alas, his son had been conceived that very night. Like Scherer’s other women, Clara was punished.
Four years later, Scherer again stood accused of impregnating Clara. Despite evidence indicating that he had urged another priest to baptize the infant, Scherer denied the charge, and the court released him without punishment. Another four years passed, and Scherer resurfaced in ecclesiastical court, pleading guilty to having a sexual relationship with another domestic and begging for mercy. Again the court was lenient. Instead of being removed from his parish, Scherer was given a stern warning, restricted to bread and water for three days and fined.
Twenty years later, the now aging Scherer faced new charges relating to his cook, Maria, who was also his mistress and his daughter-in-law. His son with Clara had married Maria, likely to cover up her relationship with his father. The priest who officiated testified that Scherer had threatened to kill him if he did not perform the ceremony. Other evidence pointed to Scherer’s having assisted Maria in obtaining an abortion, perhaps not her only one. Both the death threats and the procurement of an abortion were extremely serious crimes, and Scherer was sentenced to life imprisonment in a monastery. Maria was executed, probably burned at the stake unless she was one of the lucky prisoners who managed to arrange for a quicker, easier death by garroting. Unlike Scherer, who faced ecclesiastic judges, Maria confronted less merciful secular jurors who equated abortion with infanticide and condemned her.
By the end of the 16th century, celibacy had replaced concubinage as the standard for the Roman Catholic clergy. The Reformation, the third session of the Council of Trent in 1562 to 1563, decades of repression and changing methods of training priests had forced it to take root. In time, the medieval ambivalence about clerical celibacy that had so profoundly influenced parishioners’ expectations about their local priest evaporated. Now parishioners expected their priest to be celibate, an ideal that coincided exactly with what he had learned during his time in the seminary. He was expected to dress in distinctive clothing that distinguished him from laymen and to refrain from overindulgence in the secular vices of gambling, boozing and whoring. The reality, of course, was rather different. Though most priests no longer dared to live openly in a sexual relationship, many still lost their perpetual struggle to maintain the celibacy to which they had pledged themselves. Paradoxically, the story of clerical celibacy is also the story of clerical concubinage: where marriage is forbidden, even the most committed unions are illicit.
The intervening centuries have not seen great changes. Clerical celibacy remains largely unenforceable, and as scholarly research now reveals, about half of all priests are—as they have always been—uncelibate. But the Church and its congregations have radically different stakes in the issue. Not surprisingly, they have never found a common ground.
The Church’s public justification for hounding priests stemmed from its traditional theological commitment to celibacy, and from its conviction that celibacy would free priests from distractions and obligations so they could devote themselves exclusively to their duties. A third unspoken but equally compelling motive was that single priests were much cheaper to maintain and, unlike married men, would not use Church property to support families, underwrite sons’ careers and endow marriageable daughters. Clerical mistresses and their children were seen as deadly rivals both for priests’ loyalty and for the Church’s operating expenses.
On the other hand, as historian Henry Lea points out, these risks to the Church’s corporate body “rendered matrimony more objectionable than concubinage or licentiousness.”6 When all was said and done, concubinage and licentiousness created few obligations; marriage and legitimate children, on the other hand, could drain the Church’s resources. A priest involved in a clandestine relationship threatened the Church far less than one who married.
The consequence was that amid all the confusion and the controversy, clerical mistresses proliferated. And despite regulations that prohibited priests from engaging housekeeping women under the age of thirty or even forty, the mistress as housekeeper flourished. The very clandestineness of these relationships, and the women’s usually low social ranking, meant that until the 20th century changed attitudes and loosened tongues, few traces of individual mistresses survived.
The exception is that underutilized source: the reports of the official visitations that so thoroughly documented both personal and domestic details about clerical mistresses and their lovers. Lederer and Feldbauer’s pioneering work in this field takes the first step toward remedying this. Meanwhile, like so many historical women, these mistresses’ stories must be imagined and suggested by hypotheses based on what we know they faced: the fear of detection and its consequences; resentment at their reviled status; the promises they extracted from their priestly lovers to protect them and provide for their children. We also know that many of these women felt love, desire and pride at being chosen by these special men who held the key to divine mysteries, even to salvation.
Another key factor in these love affairs was that until celibacy was firmly entrenched as the clerical modus vivendi, women viewed priests as eligible bachelors, men with a vocation not unlike a teacher’s or a physician’s. But over the centuries, as the ideal of celibacy spread, priests developed a mystique as untouchables of a higher order. This fundamental change did not affect the majority of priest-mistress relationships until well into the medieval period. In the liberated second half of the 20th century, when reform-minded Catholics began a sustained attack on clerical celibacy, some freethinking and adventurous women again saw male religious as fair game for their erotic desires and also their romantic love.
Theodora and Marozia Theophylact7
Theodora and Marozia Theophylact were a mother-and-daughter team of mistresses who had papal lovers. These women became so politically powerful that, unlike millions of anonymous “Marthas,” contemporary accounts, mostly venomous, describe them in some detail. In 890, Theodora and her husband, Theophylact, moved from the charming old Etruscan city of Tusculum to Rome, fifteen miles away. Theophylact was a courageous and capable man who became a senator, a judge and lastly a duke responsible for the papal finances and the Roman militia. Theodora, too, was named a senator.
But Theodora aspired to more than fluttering around the papal flame in a state where the pope was the paramount leader. Her dream was to establish a family dynasty she could manipulate so she herself could rule Rome. Apparently, Theophylact shared her vision. Together, the Theophylacts maneuvered the man known to history as Sergius III, whom they had supported when his party was in exile, into the papacy.
The deal between Sergius and the Theophylacts included giving Sergius their fifteen-year-old daughter, Marozia, as his concubine. Marozia was already ripening into a woman of legendary beauty, and she and Sergius began a steamy sexual relationship. Soon, she bore him a son.
After ushering her nubile daughter into Sergius’s bed, Theodora consolidated her position and soon controlled the papal court. In 911, when Sergius died after only seven years in office, Theodora cleverly averted the usual bloody wars of succession by arranging for her nominee, Anastasius III, to take office. When Anastasius died, in 913, she promptly undertook to have Lando installed, and he survived until 914.
It happened that Theodora had fallen rapturously in love with a younger man, Bishop John of Ravenna. Lando’s death inspired her to catapult John into the papacy. He would move permanently to Rome, and not only satisfy her erotic needs but allow her to continue as the éminence grise behind the papal throne. For this “monstrous crime” of forcing her lover to become Pope John X, the much-quoted historian Liudprant condemned Theodora as a “harlot.”8
With John, Theodora became well and truly ensconced in the papal power structure. He proved much longer-lasting and more industrious than her previous puppets. He also worked harmoniously with Theophylact, her cooperative husband, to create a coalition of Italian rulers under the papacy.
Shortly after John’s installation, Theodora turned her attention to her widowed daughter. Marozia was still a highly marketable commodity, and Theodora gave her in marriage to Alberic, Marquis of Camerino. As she had been with Pope Sergius, Marozia was her parents’ reward for services rendered. Alberic was a German soldier of fortune whose band of veterans had been vital to the newly united Italian allies. As their son-in-law, Alberic joined Theodora and Theophylact in the family palace on the Aventine Hill, and he continued to provide essential military protection.
Sometime before 924, Theodora and her husband died; how, where or when we are not certain. By their society’s standards, they had carved out extraordinary lives, Theodora especially. The Theophylact dynasty thrived, and together, Theodora’s husband and her lover and accomplice, Pope John X, facilitated her mission of governance. As a mistress and a wife, Theodora succeeded in doing what few women can, uniting and dominating the two men closest to her, and doing so openly, impervious to the consternation of her compatriots. Her men were intelligent, capable and brave. They shared her dreams and treated her with respect; indeed, they honored her with their personal and professional trust.
But all was not well between Marozia and Pope John. After her parents’ death, Marozia headed the powerful Theophylact dynasty. Unlike them, she was not interested in sharing power with Pope John, their ally. Instead, she pitted herself against him in bitter rivalry. In 924, when Alberic was instrumental in repelling a Saracen attack, Marozia took the credit. At the same time, she seemed to dislike Alberic as a husband, and cheated on him with a series of lovers. But these men satisfied only her erotic desires, not her personal ambitions. To achieve those ambitions, Marozia cast her lot with John, her bastard son by Pope Sergius.
Just as Theodora had envisaged a political dynasty, Marozia contemplated a hereditary papacy, with John as its first pope. But this required getting rid of the incumbent pope, her mother’s former lover. Marozia accomplished this by divesting herself of Alberic and marrying the brother of Pope John’s military ally. Then, urged on by enthusiastic Romans, she and her new husband’s army orchestrated a siege of the gateway to the Vatican. At last Pope John capitulated, and was thrust into a dungeon, where he died, either starved to death or strangled.
Theodora, the mistress who had loved him, would have been appalled and grieved, but Marozia had no regrets. Instead, she placed two acolytes on the throne of Saint Peter until her son John turned twenty. Then she arranged his installation as Pope John XI, and continued to administer Rome in both its temporal and spiritual dimensions.
With her son ensconced as pope, Marozia no longer needed her new husband and had him murdered. Then, for militarily strategic reasons, she proposed marriage to his brother, a married man notorious for his court’s brothel-like ambiance. He quickly accepted her offer and “arranged” to become a widower. The pope, Marozia’s dissolute and docile son, officiated at their wedding. But during the wedding feast, Alberic, Marozia’s legitimate son, an astute and resourceful teenager, publicly denounced his treacherous, unloving mother and her consort. “The majesty of Rome has sunk to such depths that now she obeys the orders of harlots. Could there be anything viler than that the city of Rome should be brought to ruin by the impurities of one woman?” he bellowed.9
Rome heeded Alberic’s warnings, and mobs of citizens stormed the castle. Marozia’s bridegroom scrambled down a rope over the walls, and fled. Marozia was not so fortunate. Her rebellious people captured her, and though Alberic shrank from killing her, she was too dangerous to release. Instead, he imprisoned her in the bowels of the castle and kept her there until she died months later, unregretted and unmourned.
Marozia’s fate was horrible: entombed by her own child in dank darkness, untouched by the hot sun or fresh breezes and guarded by incorruptible men she could neither seduce, coerce nor persuade to free her. As she languished there, she must have rained curses onto Alberic’s head—all in vain. For above ground, the popular young man reclaimed the temporal power from his unfit brother, leaving him only ceremonial papal duties to attend to.
On his deathbed, Alberic begged his noblemen to elect his son, Octavian, to the papacy. They did so, and thereby ensured Marozia’s extraordinary legacy as the woman who, as mistress to a pope, spawned an entire line of popes, an irony she would likely have appreciated.
Marozia’s life was not easy. Her parents had valued her only as a tradable asset, and impounded her into mistressdom. After Sergius died, they imposed Alberic on her. After their deaths finally freed her from their control, Marozia flouted convention and sold herself as she had been sold.
But Marozia went much further than her ambitious mother. She killed and she kept faith with no one, including her husbands or the younger son who was to be her nemesis. And as mistress and mother to popes, Marozia seemed devoid of spiritual conviction, piety or belief in anything other than her own venal world.
Five centuries later, the powerful Borgia pope Alexander VI made his two mistresses famous. Rodrigo Lenzuoli was born in 1431 to the mighty Borgia clan. Like his brother Luis and his maternal uncle Alonzo, Pope Calixtus III, once a Spanish law professor, Rodrigo joined the Church. He was an imposing man, intelligent and learned, an industrious and skillful administrator and elegant in speech, manner and person. He was tall and strapping, reputedly able to hack off a bull’s head with a single stroke. He was also a graceful and fine equestrian. He was tremendously handsome and he drew women to him “as a magnet attracts iron.”
But Rodrigo had a less appealing side, especially for a cleric (though not yet a priest—in that chaotic era, unordained men could still hold Church offices, and Rodrigo was ordained only in 1468). His incurable womanizing had produced several children whom he acknowledged and provided for generously, drawing on his enormous income from the Church, several Italian and Spanish cloisters and cathedrals, his salary as vice-chancellor (1457) and money from an inheritance. Rodrigo lived extravagantly, like a prince. The one exception was his table, so frugally supplied that his friends avoided dining with him, though no doubt his abstemious diet was in large part responsible for his strength and his stamina. But Rodrigo was not a prince, he was a cleric, and his contemporaries criticized his conduct as unclerical and unseemly.
When Rodrigo met Vanozza, the daughter of a widow he was helping with legal matters (he also practiced law) and sleeping with as well, his uncle Calixtus III had already named him a cardinal. When the widow later died, Rodrigo made the eighteen-year-old Vanozza his mistress and sent her homelier sister into a convent. But first, the ambitious cardinal took the precaution of paying Domenico d’Arignano, an elderly lawyer, to marry Vanozza and give her—and more to the point, her future brood of papal bastards—his name. After d’Arignano and a subsequent husband (Giorgio di Croce) died, Borgia found replacements. He needed them—a year after her first marriage, Vanozza delivered the first of her four children with him.
Vanozza was beautiful and undemanding; she asked nothing more than to entertain Rodrigo and to raise their children in her home. She never forgot to maintain a facade of formality with him, even in her letters, and she never referred to their intimacy. Rodrigo, a stickler for etiquette and hungry to follow his uncle on the throne of Saint Peter, appreciated her discretion. Surprisingly for such an apparently unassuming woman, Vanozza also had a serious sideline: amassing a personal fortune through real estate deals and the management of inns and a pawn-broking business.
Eventually, Rodrigo had to relocate to Rome. Though for reasons that are today unknown he had ceased having sex with Vanozza, he missed her companionship so badly that he established her and the children in a house near Saint Peter’s, where they lived ostensibly with her current husband. But quietly, almost every night, Vanozza welcomed her beloved Rodrigo into her home, where they chatted companionably.
Then in 1483, without any explanation, Rodrigo broke off their decades-long affair and sent their children to live with his widowed cousin, Madonna Adriana da Mila. The only plausible reason for this abrupt termination of their relationship is that Vanozza’s relations with her husbands-of-convenience were not always strictly platonic. Gossipy contemporaries suggested as much, and Vanozza’s fifth child, Ottaviano, was known to be the son of Carlo Canale, her fifth and last husband. Rodrigo sometimes also denied—publicly and angrily—that he had sired Joffre, her fourth son.
We can only guess at how Vanozza responded to these accusations, but her anguish at losing her children, especially Lucrezia, her beloved only daughter, endured to the end of her life. Perhaps because she acquiesced in Rodrigo’s decision, however cruel, he made no attempt to excise her completely from their family’s life. His few dealings with her were friendly, and he continued to assist her financially. He granted her and Carlo the right to the Borgia coat of arms with its built-in tax exemptions. He arranged for Carlo’s appointment as warden of the Torre Nona prison, a post much coveted for its potentially enormous bribes from high-ranked prisoners. Most importantly, he permitted Vanozza to see her children, though his cousin Adriana effectively dislodged her as their mother. Vanozza endured and concentrated on her business ventures. But her signature to Lucrezia, “Your happy and unhappy mother, Vanozza Borgia,” evokes the melancholy that haunted her for the rest of her long life.
After his breakup with Vanozza, Rodrigo soon found a woman—a very young one—to assuage his longings. Giulia Farnese was sixteen, a spectacular beauty known as “Giulia la Bella.” She was blessed with inordinately long and golden hair, and a sunny and uncomplicated nature.
Though she was forty years his junior, Giulia clearly enjoyed Rodrigo’s obsessive love for her. As he had done with Vanozza, he negotiated a marriage for Giulia with the obliging Adriana’s young son, Orsino Orsini, who after the wedding was packed off to his family’s country estate at Bassenello. Giulia continued to live with Adriana and the Borgia children, and became Cardinal Borgia’s acknowledged mistress.
Giulia respected and liked her ecclesiastical lover, and was delighted by his gifts of shimmering jewels and splendid clothing. She sparkled at the parties and entertainments they attended, where the well-preserved Rodrigo danced as enthusiastically as his youthful mistress did. His good health and spartan regimen must have spared him, as well, the indignities of sexual impotence that plague so many older men.
Giulia particularly enjoyed her elevation from the modestly dowered daughter of an insignificant family to the mistress of a famous cardinal, and her family appreciated her new powers of patronage and pressured Giulia to request that Rodrigo grant positions and other favors to the Farnese clan. Fortunately, Rodrigo was sympathetic to their desire to consolidate the family fortunes, and he gladly acceded to Giulia’s embarrassed solicitations.
Rodrigo and Giulia’s affair was far from the staid and stable arrangement that had kept him with Vanozza for twenty-five years. Despite the apparent domesticity—his mistress was the close friend of his daughter, Lucrezia, and both of these young women were kept under the watchful eye of Adriana—Rodrigo suffered from raging sexual jealousy. Worse, the prime suspect was Giulia’s husband, Orsino, whom she refused to abandon and who was mesmerized by his wife’s charms.
Meanwhile, Rodrigo had a public professional life, and he was also a cardinal eagerly anticipating the death of the current pope. In the daytime, he ostentatiously performed good works, assumed a pious mien and vigorously lobbied other cardinals for their vote when the time came. In his spare time, he visited his mistress.
On July 25, 1492, Innocent VIII, the first pope to openly acknowledge his children, breathed his last. Seventeen days later, during the night of August 10–11, the cardinals voted for his successor. When the votes were counted, Rodrigo cried excitedly, “I’m Pope! I’m Pope!” Giulia Farnese was now mistress to Pope Alexander VI.
And like his uncelibate predecessor, Pope Alexander openly identified Giulia as his escort—wags dubbed her “Christ’s Bride”—and Vanozza as his children’s mother. One of Rodrigo’s first papal actions was to name Giulia’s brother Alessandro a cardinal, which earned the young man, later Pope Paul III, the nickname of “the Petticoat Cardinal.” A year later, Giulia delivered Laura, her only child, whom Rodrigo joyfully acknowledged. And when the thirteen-year-old Lucrezia was married in the Vatican, Giulia was a prominent member of the wedding party. It is unlikely that Vanozza, the bride’s mother, was allowed to attend.
Despite Giulia’s affability and delight in the excitement of splendid balls and other entertainments, she was capable of defiance, and she balked at ignoring her husband. Whenever she visited him at Bassenello, Rodrigo was racked by jealousy. Two years into his popedom, he wrote his “thankless and treacherous Giulia” a bitter letter. He excoriated her for “the evil of your soul,” which had led her “to break your solemn oath not to go near Orsino … [and] surrender yourself once more to that stallion.” Return to me at once, he ordered, “under pain of excommunication and eternal damnation.”11
To avert Rodrigo’s wrath, Orsino sent Giulia back with his mother. By the worst sort of luck, hostile French soldiers waylaid them, and the commander notified Rodrigo that if he wished to see Giulia again, he would have to pay a ransom. Rodrigo was devastated. He paid up, then waited for his mistress at the gate to the city. As she rode in, the four hundred Frenchmen who escorted her jeered as the old pope, draped in sword and dagger, ushered home the lovely blond woman he had just redeemed from captivity.
That a pope threatened his mistress with spiritual penalties because she visited her husband is ludicrous but not unprecedented—throughout the ages, clerical lovers have resorted to intimidating their mistresses with such terrifying and hypocritical warnings. Rodrigo’s desperate need to possess Giulia overrode his judgment and his pride. His furious accusations about Giulia’s clandestine sojourns to Bassenello may have been true. Certainly Romans gossiped that Laura’s biological father was none other than her legal one: Orsino Orsini.
In 1497, Giovanni, Rodrigo’s son with Vanozza, disappeared one night after a dinner party at his mother’s. His body was discovered in the river the next day, hands tied and throat slit. The murderer, likely a cuckolded husband, was never identified. Both Vanozza and Giulia tried to comfort Rodrigo, but he was inconsolable and convinced that his beloved son’s death was God’s punishment for his own sins. He vowed to reform. But after his grief had run its course, Rodrigo Borgia returned to his old ways.
In 1503, after a dinner party, the seventy-two-year-old pope was stricken by “the Roman disease,” likely cholera. For twelve days he suffered agonizing symptoms, including grotesque facial deformities he hid under a hood. On August 18, after receiving the last rites, he died. Romans by then reviled him for having defamed the papacy to enrich and empower his family, and very few attended his funeral. An eyewitness described the once grand pope’s final decay. His body had blackened. His nose had swelled up, and his tongue was engorged and lolled out of his mouth. When the coffin proved too short and narrow, the carpenters simply rolled his corpse in an old carpet, then beat it down to size.
Giulia recovered quickly. She returned to Bassenello and, two years later, arranged for her adolescent daughter, Laura, to marry a nephew of Rodrigo’s bitter enemy and successor, Pope Julius II. During her tenure as mistress to Rome’s most powerful man, Giulia had learned the importance of having the right connections.
Vanozza, too, survived long and well. When she passed away in 1518 at seventy-six, a respected and pious old woman devoted to good works, she willed a fortune in real estate to the Church.
Theodora and Marozia Theophylact had chosen pliant men to transform into puppet-popes and to found their dynasties. They would never have chosen the brilliant and canny Rodrigo Borgia, the man who had averted war between the two great powers of Spain and Portugal by drawing a line through the middle of the Atlantic and assigning the west to Spain, the east to Portugal; who had risked the ire of fellow Catholics by refusing to persecute the Jews; and who had enunciated the radical notion that American natives were not subhuman, and were quite capable of deciding whether or not to receive the Christian faith. Vanozza and Giulia, on the other hand, were the “creations” of this exceptional man, who had loved each one of them but had also consciously used them as fertile vehicles to fortify the Borgia dynasty.
Schisms aside, at any given time there is only one pope, but over the centuries there have been millions of humble priests. Unlike the papal favorites Theodora and Marozia, Vanozza and Giulia, these mistresses could expect neither wealth nor privilege. Instead, they faced persecutory laws, social censure and the severe material hardships of the clerical life, which provided only the meanest of livings.
Today, an estimated 20 to 30 percent of all Roman Catholic priests are sexually involved in relatively stable relationships with women; that is, they have mistresses. Much about these unions is astonishing, not least how well they are concealed and how often both Church officials and congregations tolerate them, often to the point of tacit acceptance. A less savory aspect of these forbidden relationships is how exploitative they are on the part of the transgressing priest. As a man unlike and above mere laymen, he may use his exalted position to influence and seduce women, usually Catholics he meets in the course of his duties. Less frequently and just as surprisingly, some women target priests, exploiting their loneliness and vulnerability. But no matter which party initiates the affair, whenever there is trouble, the Church invariably stands by its errant priest, not the suffering Catholic woman.
The modern Church actually encourages and facilitates its priests’ sexual relations by ignoring all but the most scandalous breaches of clerical celibacy. Even then, it takes notice only when media exposure forces the issue. This makes good strategic sense. As long as clerical celibacy remains official doctrine, Church officials will have to turn blind eyes to sexual incontinence if they are to stanch the bleeding that has ravaged the priesthood as priests leave to marry or to lead sexual lives. And, to protect the Church’s money, they must continue their millennia-long strategy of victimizing the women involved with priests and, by extension, the priests’ children.
One churchly ploy is to retreat behind the sophistical definition of celibacy as the state of being unmarried, rather than what is really intended: sexual abstinence. Other, more practical strategies provide ways for sexually active priests to cope.
The most common strategy is to pass off a live-in mistress as the housekeeper. Some bishops still suggest this stratagem to priests struggling with celibacy.13 And when trouble arises, often in the form of unwanted pregnancy, the Church sets into motion mechanisms to help the frightened priest, not his inconvenient mistress with her demands for financial support. The Church will often help him escape on a leave of absence, so he can mull over his situation. Church counselors may hint that abortion, doctrinally abhorrent, is less scandalous than a priest-sired infant. (Ex-priest and scholar Richard Sipe describes the abortions of priest-sired fetuses as one of the American Catholic Church’s “most lethal ticking time bombs.”)14 Church lawyers pressure the mistress to sign punishing legal documents that trade paltry support for her silence about her child’s paternity. Canonical courts invariably twist the facts to minimize financial claims against the Church, and to avoid publicity.
In his classic Shattered Vows: Priests Who Leave, ex-priest David Rice explains how the Church responds to violations of celibacy with a combination of denial and secrecy. Yet denial is “simply an immature response,” and keeping secrets, in this case the bad family kind, hobbles efforts to explore and solve the problems that caused them in the first place. “But secrets in this great family, the family bonded by Christ, are particularly destructive … and the seeds of Church pathology, disturbance, and discontent grow,” Rice concludes.15
Living these lies is excruciating. After twenty-five years, Dutch priest Fr. Willem Berger and his mistress, Henriette Rottgering, broke the silence that had shielded them from the consequences of their relationship. Leading priests and laymen in their diocese had been accomplices, pretending that Henriette was merely Willem’s housekeeping secretary. “There was a kind of agreement,” he recalled. “They knew, but without speaking about it. A lot of priests came to our home for meals.”16
A French priest waited too long to speak out. “I am a wretched man,” the cancer-stricken man lamented in deathbed repentance.17 He had abandoned his mistress out of cowardice, frightened of jeopardizing his career. Love affairs with priests hurt women disproportionately, David Rice points out.
Interestingly, in the five years between A Secret World (1990) and Sex, Priests, and Power (1995), his scholarly studies of priests and celibacy, Richard Sipe has upgraded his estimate of the ratio of priests with mistresses. It used to be about one-fifth. Now it is one-third. Sipe dissects what he calls the Greeley Syndrome, the plotline behind several of best-selling author Father Andrew Greeley’s novels. Basically, Greeley’s priests believe they must have sex with a woman, experience the anguished spiritual conflict this produces, then renounce both the sex and the woman, recommit to a life of celibacy and strive for a bishopric.
Unfortunately, as Sipe shows, the same scenario is often played out in real life. The woman becomes an instrument for the priest’s personal or spiritual development and, hopefully, his salvation. Mutuality and balance between the two partners seldom figure in these relationships. One rejected woman likened herself to a Greeley heroine and confided, “Greeley has yet to address what happens to the women after the priest has cast them off and learned from them.”18
Today, priests’ mistresses are usually Catholics who meet their lovers at church, confession, counseling or parish activities such as Sunday school. They are often married and unpossessive, being in no position to make too many demands. But some of these women are unmarried, and unmarried women have different stakes and expect more. They often expect to be acknowledged for what they are—clerical lovers. They even dare hope and sometimes push for eventual marriage.
By no means are all women passive victims. With clerical celibacy a long-established ideal, priests have become—to themselves as well as to Catholics in general—men of a different sphere of existence. The notion of a virile, untouchable and celibate priest strikes some women as romantic and exciting—in short, a challenge.
Some priests are well aware of their appeal, and they shamelessly employ it to seduce women who expose their vulnerability in confession and counseling sessions, or who, during parish functions, indicate subtly or otherwise that they are available. Other priests, despite their best intentions, are overwhelmed by longing for a beautiful woman, or by their growing affection for a needy and trusty woman they have come to know intimately.
Usually, mistresses have the advantage of considerably more sexual experience. But this provides them no protection from emotional involvement and the pain that follows a rupture. Then these women, too, feel the unbearable weight of the mighty Church, whose disapproval falls primarily on mistresses rather than their priestly partners in sin.
Church authorities usually hold three assumptions about priests’ mistresses. First of all, any woman sleeping with a priest has only herself to blame for her situation, because she has wielded her erotic powers to lure him into having sex with her. Second, she is fortunate that she is involved with a godly man, and should express her gratitude through silence. Third, she has the God-given power to save her lover through her love and sacrifices. She should be gratified rather than wretched if he realizes how much his vocation means to him and breaks off their affair.
American Annie Murphy is one among legions of women who have loved priests. She first met Eamonn Casey, the bishop of Kerry and a distant relative of her father, when he visited her family in the United States. Then he was twenty-nine, Annie a child of seven. In April 1973, when she was a grown woman, her father sent her over to Ireland, into Eamonn’s care, to recuperate from the emotional turmoil of a failed marriage and, he hoped, to regain her lapsed faith.
From the moment Eamonn met Annie at Shannon International Airport, he was bewitched and bewitching. He flirted and held her hand. Within three weeks, they had sex in the rectory that was his home. On the first night, Eamonn stripped off his faded blue pajamas and stood, naked and vulnerable, in front of the twenty-four-year-old American. “There stood the Bishop, my love, without clerical collar or crucifix or ring, without covering of any kind. The great showman had unwrapped himself. Christmas of all Christmases,” Annie later recalled. In bed, Eamonn made love urgently and with all the ineptitude of twenty-five years of celibacy. “I witnessed a great hunger,” Annie wrote. “This was an Irish Famine of the flesh.”19
The next morning, as she watched Eamonn drape himself in bishop’s robes and go off to sing mass, Annie worried that he might hate her for what had happened. Already, the complexities of loving a priest were revealing themselves. But Eamonn was too intellectually resourceful to give up this delightful foray into fleshly delights, even after his confessor instructed him to. Annie was wounded in body and mind, Eamonn argued. Only a deep love—his—could heal her. “This is a passage in your life and someone must go with you and help you face its dangers,” he told Annie as he contentedly sipped brandy. “If God were here, He would approve of what I am doing.”20
The affair progressed. Eamonn would pray lengthily before arriving at Annie’s bedroom. Then they made love and bantered with each other. Eamonn would quote Scripture to justify what he was doing. Soon Annie had fallen in love with the puckish priest. He claimed that he loved her too, but warned her that he was permanently sworn to his vocation.
The relationship deepened, though Annie realized that Eamonn would abandon her at the first hint of trouble. As if she were tempting fate or forcing him to make a choice between her and his vocation, she attended mass and stared at him throughout, frightening and embarrassing him.
On the subject of birth control, which Annie favored, Eamonn was adamantly opposed, at least publicly. “If I deviate once in the slightest from the Catholic position, I will have to leave the priesthood,” he explained. “The Church will forgive me, Annie, whatever sins I commit: murder, theft, adultery. But one careless phrase [such as condoning condoms or the Pill, or questioning the Church’s ban on them] and all the good work I’m doing would come to an end.”21 (In the United States, Jesuit Terrance Sweeney would also conclude that this was the Church’s modus operandi.)
One night, in a frenzy of lust, Eamonn took Annie on the floor outside his bedroom, under the first station of the cross: Jesus Is Condemned to Death. He also confessed to her, anxiously, that even during mass he could not stop thinking about her. And then Annie became pregnant. Eamonn’s first reaction was that it was a terrible tragedy. He suggested that another man was the father. Then, in a startling volte-face, he wanted to make love to her.
Annie reassured her lover that she did not expect him to marry her or to leave the priesthood. When he told people that she had had an affair with a Dublin hotelier, and was now “in trouble,” she confirmed the story. She even agreed to Eamonn’s urgent demand that she find God in her heart and allow a Catholic family to adopt her baby. This sacrifice, he assured her, would atone for her sins, and for his in having sired the child.
But when she held the infant Peter in her arms, Annie reneged on her agreement. Eamonn, no longer tender and understanding, ordered her to get rid of “it”—she was not, he said, morally fit to be a mother. When Annie resisted, Eamonn had her transferred to a home for unmarried mothers, where the nuns, on his orders, withheld proper medical treatment when she developed a blood clot and later an infection. All the while, he pressured her to sign Peter’s adoption papers.
But Annie refused, and recalled bitterly how even Saint Augustine had proudly acknowledged his illegitimate son and named him Adeodatus, “Given by God.” When she decided to leave Ireland and take Peter back to the United States, Eamonn drove her to the airport in his Mercedes and handed her $2,000 with a warning to spend it sparingly, because it was all he had.
Incredibly, their affair did not end there. Six months later, Annie and her parents returned to Dublin, and she and Eamonn resumed sexual relations. Annie suspected that her father was aware of this but had decided to give the couple both time and opportunity to determine their future course. It did not take him long to realize that Eamonn would never choose Annie over his ambition to be known as savior of the third world. That ambition drove him, among other things, to chair a society called Trócaire—Irish for “compassion”—that raised funds for the third-world poor.
Back in Eamonn’s bed, Annie refused to concede defeat and remained in Ireland until, like her father, she concluded that he would never leave the Church. Eamonn was furious that she intended to take Peter back to the United States, and translated his anger into parsimonious child support. The twin issues of money, or lack of it, and Eamonn’s refusal to acknowledge Peter, whom he had grown to love, were never resolved.
Sixteen years later, when Eamonn was visiting the United States, Peter ambushed him. Eamonn granted his son four minutes of polite conversation—how was he doing? what college did he plan to attend?—then dismissed him. Peter was as devastated as he was angry, and he decided to launch a lawsuit against his father. Meanwhile, Annie demanded—and received—a final settlement of $125,000. She and Eamonn spent one last surreptitious night together, though she was living with another man. Later, Annie sued Eamonn on Peter’s behalf, in Ireland. The lawsuit destroyed Eamonn’s reputation and career. In 1992, he resigned as bishop, and issued a statement recognizing Peter as his son and regretting the harm he had done to him and his mother, Annie Murphy. Eamonn also admitted that, to placate and silence Annie, he had stolen her $125,000 settlement money from Trócaire, from funds designated for the poor of the third world. Wealthy parishioners swiftly came to his aid and repaid the money.
Eamonn retired to St. Joseph’s Church in Redhill, Surrey, effectively exiled from Ireland. Annie Murphy wrote a book revealing, in salacious detail, the progress of their affair and its unsavory aftermath. In 1999, however, she expressed regret that she had said too much: “Eamonn was such a triumphant spirit and I feel now he is a man without a country,” she said.22
The Eamonn Casey scandal reminded people of revelations that other bishops and other priests, in Ireland and elsewhere, had also engaged in love affairs, fathered children they had tried to have adopted and—resorting to the Church’s time-honored strategy for incorporating women into their lives–introduced their mistresses as housekeepers. Eamonn Casey was not the odd priest out—he had merely been spectacularly “outed.”
Father Pat Buckley, a priest in Larne, Northern Ireland, runs a support group for Irish women romantically linked with priests. Buckley’s experiences with nearly one hundred of his bereft clients confirm that the Church is myopic in its perspective, and concerned only with its own interests. Silence is more than golden—it is imperative. When love gets out of hand, the bishop (who may be in the same love boat himself) summons his errant priest, and admonishes or transfers him to another parish far away from his mistress. “I’ve never actually heard of a priest being censured,” Buckley reports. “The main interest is to protect the good name of the church.”23
Buckley’s analysis of the troubled priest-mistress issue coincides exactly with others’ in Ireland (which Pope John Paul II calls “the rock of the faith”) and elsewhere. For example, Irish priest Father Michael Cleary seduced seventeen-year-old Phyllis Hamilton after he had heard her confession. They began an affair that produced two children. After the birth of the first, Cleary forced Phyllis to surrender her child to adoptive parents. Finally, Phyllis left Ireland for a better life in the United States and she took Ross, their second child, with her. Cleary bombarded her with frantic phone calls and letters. He implored her to return to the rectory and promised that Ross could live with them. After some time, Phyllis agreed. Cleary would often point out other priests whose single-mother housekeepers were also their mistresses.
After Cleary’s death nearly two decades later, Phyllis approached the Church for guidance. Its stern officials made it clear they had no intention of helping her, and wished only for her and her inconvenient son to disappear.
Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of priests have mistresses, either live-in “housekeepers,” married or single parishioners or, occasionally, nuns encountered in the course of priestly service. Each love is unique, but the context is not.
For the married mistress, the affair is often less traumatic. She understands that she can expect nothing more than she has. She is also taking less of a risk, because Catholic husbands have proven astonishingly resilient about sharing their wives with their priests. This is a reflection of their empathy for men forced to swear off sex, of their deep reverence for even sinful priests or of their relief that their wife’s extramarital relationship will not endanger their marriage.
Single, non-resident mistresses expect far more from their clerical lovers than clandestine couplings. They frequently suggest or even demand marriage. For their lovers, this can be dangerous and frightening territory. It implies that they should break their vows and abandon not merely their profession, but also the institutional family that has disciplined and nurtured them.
The spiritual issues are just as burning for the priests, and thrust compulsory celibacy into the forefront of their thinking, since this is, above all, what constrains their relationships. Why is it essential? healthy? morally superior? spiritually fulfilling? Questions that have dogged Roman Catholic theology for millennia take on a personal urgency.
When a woman is both a nun and mistress to a priest, she and her partner agonize together over such questions. Both lovers face the same moral dilemma, the same vocational demise, the same social and institutional contempt and shame and, above all, the same spiritual suffering and sorrow. However, the considerable number of ex-nuns now married to ex-priests is proof that, in the end, the prospect of love blessed by the sacrament of marriage is often the most convincing answer.
The burden of loving a priest falls hardest on the resident mistress, the ubiquitous “priest’s housekeeper.” This woman has no other life than his, no other home, few activities apart from parish life. She is his sin incarnate, the constant and visible source of his shame, a perpetual reproach to his vows of celibacy and obedience. She has the lowly status of a char, and no marital rights at all, though in all other ways she is wifely.
But the housekeeper’s bleak situation has consolations. Assuming that she loves her lover (not always the case), this woman has the privilege of living with him on the most intimate terms, knowing most of what there is to know about him, including his colleagues and friends, habits and tastes, vices and virtues, his tenderness as he lies limp and depleted beside her, his anxiety that someone will discover his secret, his remorse that he is wicked and weak, his fear that he is unworthy of the vocation he lies and schemes to preserve.
Paradoxically, though his housekeeping mistress is the mortal most intimately acquainted with his human frailties, the priest may nonetheless bully and intimidate her through the force of his moral authority. What moral authority? That which he holds because he is an ordained priest, privy to the great Christian truths and mysteries. Perversely, many priests wield this authority like a club, especially with mistresses—witness Pope Alexander VI’s threatening to excommunicate his beloved Giulia if she persisted in visiting her husband, and Bishop Eamonn Casey’s hectoring Annie Murphy to give up her baby as punishment for the sin of loving him.
Even nuns feel something of this moral sledgehammer; though they are also pledged to God, they are mere women, unfit for ordination. Then, too, when a nun commits carnal sin, she usually finds her superiors less tolerant, less willing to attribute her sinfulness to overpowering nature, less prepared to blame her partner.
Some women in covert relationships with clerics reject the label of “mistress.” They believe it denigrates the nature of their relationship, and they reject the validity of the compulsory celibacy that denies them the comfort of the sacrament of marriage. “Michael was my husband and I was his wife,” insists fifty-four-year-old American Louise Iushewitz, who in 1994 lost her longtime Jesuit partner to an assassin’s bullet in Belfast.
Louise was a few weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday when Michael walked into her life as the teaching assistant for her sophomore philosophy course at the University of Chicago. “He was gorgeous,” she recalls, “six foot one, with a chunky build. He had these amazing blue eyes, strange eyes like blue satin that crunched up when he smiled, and a wonderful laugh.”
The precocious Louise was more intrigued than smitten with the thirty-two-year-old TA who seemed to have a defensive wall around him. “I bet you can get him,” a friend remarked. On the strength of this dare, Louise bet five dollars that she could indeed “get” Michael, and began to pursue him. They began to date casually, but Louise claims that until she was eighteen, she had no idea he was a Jesuit or even a priest.
One day just before his thirty-fourth birthday, Michael sat her down and said, “I’m going to tell you what I do for a living.” Louise was so shocked that for two weeks, she refused to speak to him. “I was scared of going to hell,” she recalls. Soon, however, she reconciled herself to life as a Jesuit’s girlfriend.
When Louise was nineteen, she and Michael began to live together in a Hyde Park apartment, and it was there that they had their first sexual encounter. Michael, who had already had other lovers, set their slow pace. Only when he intuited that Louise was ready for it did he initiate sex. She prepared herself for this new adventure by reading a sex manual. “It was green and had no cover,” she says. “I fell off the couch laughing as I read it, but that night, we had sex for the first time.”
Their sex life was complicated by Michael’s guilt. At first, his excessive drinking dulled his sensibilities. But when Louise was twenty-one, Michael’s Jesuit Provincial summoned him and presented him with an ultimatum: You have twenty minutes to decide to either give up the bottle or give up the Jesuits. Michael chose sobriety and spent the next three months in a Minnesota rehabilitation center. Afterward, he attended Alcoholics Anonymous.
But cold sober, he was uncomfortable with the spiritual and vocational implications of his erotic life, and Louise remembers their sex life then as “really terrible.” Even fidelity was lacking. After Michael cheated on her with another woman, Louise retaliated with another man, who impregnated her. As a devout Catholic, she would not consider abortion, and in 1969, she gave birth to a son, Jay, whom she gave up for adoption.
Louise’s fertility became an urgent issue. She wanted Michael’s baby. Michael didn’t. Finally, in 1970, Louise broke off their relationship and warned him, “I want to have a child. I’m going to marry the first man who asks me.”
That man was very handsome but difficult. Her marriage, Louise came to believe, was God’s way of punishing her for having slept with a priest. Ten miserable years and three children later, she left him. Two weeks after this, in August 1980, she and Michael moved into an apartment together.
The final fourteen years of their union were markedly better than the first six. They had both matured, and Louise was no longer “an adoring little thing” who worshipped Michael. She was now the mother of three children who called Michael “Daddy,” and their life together consisted of the usual realities: cooking and shopping, arguing and making love, caring for the children.
Nonetheless, their lifestyle was unusual. Almost all their friends were priests and their lovers. Michael’s family was sharply divided about Louise: his father condemned her as a Jezebel and a whore, while his mother insisted that Louise was the only thing that kept Michael sane. In retrospect, Louise realizes, their life revolved around lying and teaching the children to lie. Louise abhorred this aspect of her existence. “I don’t like lying, living a lie, having my whole life dedicated to lying,” she says now with some bitterness.
Quite apart from the mechanics of maintaining their duplicitous life, they faced other obstacles. For one thing, Michael was stationed in Milwaukee and only commuted back to Louise and the children in Chicago on Thursday, to leave again on Sunday. For another, he was actively involved in gathering intelligence for the Irish Republican Army, an activity that ultimately cost him his life. Louise accompanied him on some of his trips to Ireland, and she smuggled in outlawed condoms and birth control pills.
At the core of their long relationship, however, was Michael’s vocation. “Half my friends are priests who run parishes and they’re better off because someone loves and supports them,” Louise declares. She is convinced Jesuit officials knew all about her. They did nothing, however, as long as Michael’s ministry was unaffected and his love life did not provoke a public scandal.
Michael himself was seldom conflicted, and conveniently—and ironically—redefined his vows. Celibacy was a gift of God, and therefore not a way of life to be imposed on priests. Chastity meant fidelity to one person–Louise. Poverty was an irrelevancy to American Jesuits, whom he observed all living very well. Obedience was to the Provincial General, and not to the pope, especially John Paul II, whom he despised as “the Anti-Christ.” As for sex, Michael believed that experiencing a powerful orgasm was “as close as you can get to understanding the intensity of God’s love.”
Only once, in 1992, was Michael seized by doubts and remorse. Then he telephoned Louise to announce that he would make her an honest woman by marrying her. “I told him I didn’t want to be honest,” Louise laughs. “I think Michael was just scared that I’d run off with one of our friends, even though the man in question is gay.” Louise’s decision was easy. She knew all too well that Michael would be lost if he was not a Jesuit. She knew, too, that leaving the order was an ordeal for Jesuits, and that those who left emerged into the lay world embittered, humiliated and rejected.
At Michael’s “stuffy Jesuit funeral,” Louise sat with his family. But she and her children were barred from the reception and the wake. Like millions of mistresses, she had no claim on her dead lover.
Six years after Michael’s death, Louise was still grieving. Above all, she missed his companionship. “I am an intellectual being,” she said, “and my pride and joy is my analytical ability. Michael met all my needs.”
Louise has been forced to become more independent. Michael left her only five thousand dollars, and she has had to earn her own living again. Much worse, the insecurity of her new life as a single woman has been “horrible, an emotional wrench.”
Louise has continued to feel her own call to the priesthood. “I’ve even said mass, and the walls didn’t fall down,” she recalled. “And at the end of the day, I’m very gratified that I had Michael in my life.”
Some clerical mistresses are happy in their covert relationships. A few finally marry their lover, after he renounces his vows and returns to “the world.” The experience of one Jesuit who fell in love but waited until his wedding night to consummate his relationship illustrates just how the Church, in this case the Society of Jesus, deals with these illicit affairs of the heart.
Father Terrance Sweeney had been a Jesuit for twenty-three years when he met actress Pamela Shoop, a Christian Scientist seeking spiritual solace through conversion to Roman Catholicism. Terry and Pamela see themselves as archetypes of couples whose romantic love has, for centuries, run aground on the rocks of celibacy. “Behind each tortured priest … [is] a woman alone … in the shadows,” they write. That woman has little control over what happens. He, not she, has taken vows, and so she is forced to wait, isolated and lonely, frightened for her future, for her priest’s decision.
Pamela and Terry met and fell in love when both were struggling with personal crises. He was particularly troubled about the results of his examination of the origins and history of clerical celibacy, an institution he began to suspect was unethical and unchristian. The Church scorned lovelorn priests more than child molesters. “Why didn’t our seminary teachers tell us that married priests and their wives who refused to follow mandatory abstinence were forced out of the priesthood, were beaten, imprisoned, and sometimes even murdered?” he demanded of his spiritual adviser.25
But Terry loved the Church, the Jesuits and his vocation. “It’s as if I love you with a divided heart, Pam,” he confided. He finally decided to leave the Jesuits, but delayed taking the final steps. Then the Jesuits suddenly ordered him to halt his research on celibacy. Terry was so stunned by the unfairness of this decree that after twenty-four years, he freed himself from the Society.
But not from the Church, from which Terry sought incardination, the right to function as a priest. He was letting go, but only in stages.
As Terry dealt with the profoundly difficult transition from Jesuit to ordinary priest, Pamela wrestled different demons. She was lonely, barred from Terry’s sparkling social life at dinners, fundraisers and evenings with friends and parishioners. She became jealous and angry, and so sexually frustrated that she still recalls with sadness how Terry’s commitment to celibacy kept them from expressing the passionate love they felt for each other. She longed for his entire body but accepted his good-night pecks because she knew that if she slept with him, she would undermine her own personal integrity and Terry’s credibility as he spoke out about clerical celibacy.
During the two years she waited for her fate to be decided, Pamela saw herself as merely one in a centuries-long line of despairing priests and their women who had clung “to the desperate hope that somehow, some way, history could be altered, that everything would turn out all right.”26 She remembered Father Franco Trombotto, an Italian priest who spent twenty years in a secret love affair, and could no longer bear either the anguish of living without his mistress or his duplicity in concealing their affair. On January 26, 1985, he hanged himself and explained in his final letter, “I have carried my cross a long way: now I fall under the cross.”27
Pamela’s bitterness poisoned her relationship with Terry. She raged that he was moving with glacial slowness to change his life, and he retorted that after twenty-four years as a Jesuit, he was moving very quickly indeed. Eventually he began to accept Pam’s longing for sex. Instead of guilt at his own desire, he felt joy that God had given him this gift of love. One night, he tore off Pam’s black lace panties so he could embrace her nakedness though he still could not accept sexual relations outside of marriage.
Pamela’s long wait came to an end the next Easter Sunday, when Terry proposed to her. Their wedding was bittersweet. Terry’s oldest brother refused to stand as his best man because he had broken his vows and left both the Jesuits and, by then, the priesthood. Many friends shunned Pamela as the seductress who had lured him away from Holy Mother Church. Archbishop Mahoney even banned Terry from Holy Communion for as long as he continued in his “irregular canonical union”—that is, until he divorced his new wife.28
Since their marriage, Pamela and Terry have served on the board of advisers of Good Tidings, a nonprofit organization founded in 1983 as a resource for priests and the women they are romantically involved with.29 Tellingly, Good Tidings was founded after the suicide of a woman whose priest-lover had broken up with her.
Good Tidings, one of a host of such organizations worldwide, takes a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense approach. At the same time, it retains a Catholic perspective and understanding, and defines itself as a ministry. Its mission is to work for spiritual as well as psychological and emotional resolutions, which means that those who seek its help must “discern before God what their relationship is and should be.” It may be celibate. It may also be marital.
“A Legal Guide,” by Ronald A. Sarno, is Good Tidings’ practical handbook for “Mothers or Expectant Mothers of the Children of Roman Catholic Clergy.” The “Guide,” brutally frank, is designed as a resource to combat the apparatus the Church has designed to crush these shunned mothers into submission. No one reading it should retain any illusions about the primacy of Christian charity in the Church’s stance.
Priests or Church officials often give the nod to abortion, though they condemn it in public. “Clergy find it very easy to tell non-clergy what the moral requirement is,” Sarno advises, but “they are not always so concise with their own.” A woman may find herself bound by a Settlement Agreement or Settlement Order requiring her to withhold from her child his father’s identity. As it has for two millennia, the institutional Church discourages priests from assuming any parental responsibility for their offspring.
This forthright disinclination to support children harks back to the Church’s original fears that married clergy would allocate Church revenues and property to their families. If the cleric-father is a parish priest or member of an order, his parish or order may be named as codefendant in any legal action against him. This fact, as terrifying to today’s Church as to yesteryear’s, derives from the legal theory respondeat superior, meaning that “the institutional Church, since it supposedly controls the activities of its official members, has a financial responsibility for the harm these officials do.”
As for canon law, Sarno writes that “no matter what the canons say in theory, in practice canonical courts and/or canonical inquiries have as their sole purpose the protection of the Church from financial responsibility, and to keep embarrassing facts out of the media. Canonical courts and/or inquiries are not set up to help women who are bearing the children of Catholic clergy.”30
The Church will employ attorneys against a woman who sues, and their mission is to embarrass her and to keep her financial demands low. These lawyers will also try for a Settlement Order, an agreement not to go to trial. Since the priest and institutional Church desire secrecy almost as much as financial absolution, they will arrange a payment plan in exchange for the mother’s promise not to contact the media or continue legal proceedings.
The Church’s abhorrence of publicity is the mistress’s principal weapon. If negotiations stall, or the priest or his agents offer too small a payment, the threat of media attention often jolts the clerical negotiators into action.
Other heart-wrenching advice for these mothers is to name the Church as a codefendant, “especially if the Church has been directly involved in hiding the birth father from you and from the Court.” In fact, “the institutional Church almost always transfers the father out of the State where the mother is.” How twisted and sad that the Church, founded on the truths and mysteries of a little boy born in circumstances so awkward that only faith in his miraculous conception saved him from bastardy, has devised so many mechanisms to cripple the attempts of the Virgin Mary’s daughters to claim their just deserts.
In the Roman Catholic Church, despite the passage of centuries, little has changed. Priests’ mistresses are still one-man harlots, and their children the unsavory fruit of sin. Their lovers remain married to a Church that demands celibacy as well as fidelity and obedience as the price of their vocation to follow in Christ’s footsteps and to serve God.